Tiger in the Hot Zone (Shifter Agents Book 4)

by Lauren Esker

  Like when she'd lost her leg.

  She had been twelve, and she had understood perfectly what was happening to her, even at that young age. When she talked to people about it later, she usually told them that she didn't remember much of it, because it seemed to make them feel better. But she remembered everything.

  She remembered the way her own blood had smelled, a warm metallic stink. She remembered the cool feeling of damp earth under her body as she lay on her back, the way the spring field stubble had pressed uncomfortably into her spine. At the time, the fact that she was lying in mud had felt more uncomfortable than whatever was going on with her leg. She remembered the terrified faces of the adults leaning over her, framed by the brilliant blue sky. They were talking over each other, almost babbling as they tried to tell her what had happened to her, and she remembered answering impatiently, "I know. My leg got torn off, right?"

  "She's in shock," someone had said, out of her field of vision.

  Perhaps she had been, but all she remembered was feeling calm. She understood everything that was happening, but none of it had touched her yet.

  She felt the same way now, perfectly calm and rational, with a vague sense that it was going to hit her full-force sooner or later.

  But for now, she watched the passing scenery as Noah turned off the interstate and wound down small country roads, with stops at the occasional rural gas station for restroom breaks. She had seen quite a bit of the outlying towns around Seattle while pursuing Bigfoot, UFOs, and other investigations of interest to readers of the Tell Me More! site, but she didn't currently have a car—the beater she used to drive had been totaled in an accident the previous winter, and she'd spent most of the insurance money paying off bills and hadn't been able to afford a new one yet. In the meantime she'd been limping along with public transportation, Uber, and occasionally getting rides with someone when she had to go further afield. It was nice to get out in the country again.

  Once a country girl, always a country girl. She'd hated growing up in the middle of nowhere, but there were a few nice things about it, like the smells of green growing things that you just didn't get in the city. Looking out the window, she could almost smell it—in fact—

  "Hey, what are you doing?" Noah protested as she reached over to fumble with the car's controls.

  "Putting your top down. We need some air in here."

  Noah blocked her hand with the one not resting on the steering wheel. "You can't do it while we're driving at highway speeds. Jeez. Don't you know anything about cars?"

  "My last car had a collision with a cow, so I'm not going to answer that question."

  "You ran into a cow."

  "It's a long, embarrassing story, and you really don't want to hear it." She felt her cheeks turning pink.

  Noah pulled off onto the shoulder of the highway and pushed a button on the dash. The top of the Camaro folded itself back, accordion-style, letting in warm afternoon air that smelled rich and fresh.

  "Ask and receive. I wouldn't do this if we were closer to town, but at this point I'm confident there's no one on our tail." He looked back down the empty road, then gave her a warm smile that turned her insides to mush as he pulled back onto the highway. "And you're right. It's too nice a day to drive around with the top up. Sure you don't want to tell me the cow story? We've got about forty-five minutes to go, according to the directions Stiers gave me, so there's plenty of time."

  "No," Peri said, hoping she wasn't still blushing but very much afraid she was.

  "I'll reciprocate. Want to hear about the time in college when I got talked into a drunken prank involving a sheep, a florist's van full of helium balloons, and six pairs of women's nylons?"

  Peri opened her mouth on the verge of "yes," then closed it. "Nope. Not even a little bit."

  "Or maybe the other time in college when I fell asleep on a balcony at a frat party, six stories off the ground, and woke up to realize everyone else had gone home and locked the doors, it was four in the morning, and I'd left my phone inside, in my coat? And I had a very important test in a few hours?"

  Peri snorted. "Drank heavily in college, did you?"

  "Hey, there was no alcohol involved in that one. Well, maybe half a drink. It was finals week and I'd pulled two all-nighters in a row."

  "Good adulting."

  "You're supposed to be an idiot in college. It's a rule."

  "I was very well-behaved, I'll have you know," Peri said primly.

  Noah choked on a laugh.

  "Hey! What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Sorry," he said, eyes sparkling with humor. "It's just that ever since you turned up on the Seattle conspiracy-blogger scene, I don't think a week has gone by when you haven't been breaking into somewhere or posting something online that you're not supposed to know about. Somehow I find the idea that you used to be a perfect angel of a student very hard to believe."

  "Believe it or not, it's true. I went to school on scholarships. If I didn't study and keep my grades up, I'd lose them, and ..."

  And have to crawl back to my family in defeat. I'd rather have died.

  Noah seemed to be waiting for her to finish, but she didn't want to talk about her family, so instead she said, "I wouldn't have guessed you for a frat bro in college, either. You seem like the original straight arrow. Nose to the grindstone and all of that."

  "Hey, I resent that." Noah pointed to the stud winking in his left ear. "I have an earring, see? I'm a wild and crazy guy."

  "I can see that, Tiger," she said dryly. He still got the weirdest look on his face, just for an instant, every time she called him that, which meant she had to keep doing it; she'd take her entertainment where she could find it. "So which is your alma mater, U-Dub or Wazoo? I'm a Wazoo girl myself." Washington's two main universities were the University of Washington in Seattle, or U-Dub to locals, and Washington State University on the other side of the state, nicknamed Wazoo for its WSU abbreviation.

  "Neither. I wasn't a local student. Mine was, uh ..." His sudden embarrassment surprised her, and she was sure he was going to name a community college she'd never heard of, but instead he said in the tone of a person confessing a dark secret: "Yale."

  "Yale ... the Ivy League school, that Yale?"

  "You know a different one?"

  "Wow. No. I just don't tend to hang out with people from that rarified end of the spectrum, that's all." Granted, her friends tended to be lowlifes and weirdos, not exactly the Ivy League type. "What'd you major in?"

  "Economics," Noah said. "I planned to go on for a law degree after I got my bachelor's, but decided not to."

  From his darkly weighted tone, Peri sensed an entire unspoken novel between the lines of that simple statement. However, given all the things she was hiding, she let his secrets go ... for now. "I take back what I said about you being a party animal, now that I know you're an econ major. My bad."

  "Hey! I'll have you know many famous people have economics degrees. President Bush, for example—the first one, not the second."

  "I still bet he wasn't what you'd call the life of the party."

  Noah grinned, then flinched as his phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out one-handed and balanced it on the steering wheel to read a text.

  "Is it legal for a federal agent to do that?" Peri wanted to know. "Or safe?"

  "Fine, make yourself useful." He tossed the phone to Peri, who caught it, startled. "It's from the other agent at the safehouse. Nothing classified; she just gave me a shopping list. Read it off to me."

  The text was labeled CHO. "If you're inbound, pick up groceries," Peri read. "There's nothing here but canned soup and expired mini-size bags of potato chips." A second text came in as she was reading. "If you value your sanity," she went on reading, "bring coffee. Lots of it. That last part is in all caps."

  "Ha. That's Cho, all right. Okay, I guess we get to pick what's on the menu. Text her back that we'll stop in town and be there in about a half hour."

  Per
i typed out the requested message. "What town?" she asked skeptically.

  But even as she said it, they passed a junkyard—hundreds of old cars, weeds growing up around their flat tires, languishing behind a wire mesh fence—and drove into a small downtown. It wasn't much, just a gas station and a scattered handful of small-town businesses (a diner, an antique store, a place selling ice cream). One of these was a small grocery store. Noah topped up the Camaro's tank at the gas station and then parked in the store's gravel lot.

  "There are going to be five people in the house, including us," he told Peri, checking his jacket to make sure it was covering his gun. "You, the doc, and the morgue assistant, plus two agents. Pick up what you want. It's on the government's dime."

  "Can we get booze on the government's dime?" Peri asked hopefully. She wasn't a big drinker, but if the feds were going to pay for expensive microbrews, she didn't plan to say no.

  "Don't push your luck."

  The store's selection was limited, but there was a basic array of staples. Peri took the lead, cleaning out the tiny meat cooler's family-sized packages of chicken breasts into Noah's basket, followed by a sack of rice and a handful of spice bottles. "Oh. Veggies." She put in a large bag of frozen peas and another of green beans. "Do we need to shop for tomorrow too? Chili might be good for feeding five people easily. I bet they have beans here. Do you know if anybody at the house has any special food needs? Oh! We should get bread too."

  Noah was staring at her.

  "What?" Peri asked impatiently.

  "Uh, you're very ... efficient at this." He gestured down at the contents of the basket, to which Peri was in the process of adding a couple of boxes of breakfast cereal. "I mean, I wouldn't have thought of half these things. I'd probably just have picked up some TV dinners or something."

  Peri looked down at the box of bran flakes in her hand. She hadn't even thought about it. She'd been living on her own and shopping for a single person for ages now. But as a child, she had watched the adults around her shopping and preparing meals for a large group of people, and now it turned out she had a whole skill set she didn't even know about.

  "It's just common sense," she said waspishly.

  "I guess."

  Peri went off to get another basket before he asked more questions, since the first one was filled to the top. She wandered the narrow aisles, snagging a can of instant coffee, some sugar and creamer, and a package of cookies while she was at it.

  Noah joined her with a small package of beans in his hand. Peri rolled her eyes; he really thought that was going to feed a house full of people? She added two more to her basket, along with some canned tomatoes.

  "You grew up in a large family," Noah guessed. "Bunch of little brothers and sisters. Am I right?"

  "Get us some bread, Tiger."

  Peri added a head of lettuce and a jug of milk to her basket, grabbed a toothbrush to replace her lost one, then headed for the checkout counter with Noah in tow. There was no line, but also no clerk.

  "Hello?" Noah called.

  "Just a minute, hon!" came a voice from somewhere deep in the store. A toilet flushed, and a moment later, a cheerful-looking woman in her forties appeared. "Here, I gotcha. Sorry for the wait. You folks got cash? We can't take cards right now; the machine's broken. I meant to put up a sign. There's an ATM down at the Chevron station, but we don't have one here. Though," she added, ringing up items without pausing for breath, "if you want, I could take down your card info and charge it later, when the repair guy gets back to me. Just gimme a good contact number in case it's declined."

  Noah looked flummoxed by this outpouring of rural good will, while Peri could only grin. Small towns were the same all over. "Can we pay cash?" she asked Noah.

  "Uh, cash is fine," he managed.

  Peri peered with professional interest as he peeled ATM-crisp $20 bills out of his wallet. It looked like there were more where those came from. Putting that together with Yale and the car ...

  Dude is loaded. Or maybe his family is. So what's a guy like that doing working at a bottom-tier federal agency?

  Or maybe the SCB aren't at the bottom of the federal law enforcement food chain after all. Maybe they're the top guys, the folks who cover up stuff even the CIA won't touch ...

  "You folks going up to the mountains on vacation?" the clerk was asking.

  "Yep, getting out of the city for awhile," Noah said with artificial cheer.

  "Yeah? Where you goin'?"

  There was an ominous pause as Noah floundered once again, completely out of his depth regarding the local geography. Total city kid, Peri thought, and jumped into the conversational gap. "Oh, we're driving to the North Cascades. We'll rent a cabin near Ross Lake for a few days, maybe do some hiking and fishing."

  "Yeah? My uncle's got a place on the north end of the lake. I can show you some good hiking trails—" The clerk pulled a map from behind the counter.

  "Oh, I'm so sorry, but we have to get on the road!" Peri said. She snugged an arm around Noah's waist. Oh God. So firm, so nice to hold onto ... "Miles to go before we stop, and all of that. It's still a long drive, right hon?"

  "Right," Noah said firmly. He went to put an arm around her shoulders, changed it to an awkward pat, and then hastily scooped up two of the bags of groceries.

  In the parking lot, Peri said, "Are you really a federal agent, or did you get your badge out of a cereal box?"

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "I mean you're total crap at lying, is what I mean."

  "There's a big difference between selling an established cover and having to come up with one on the fly," Noah retorted. "It's a skill, and one I haven't had much experience at developing. I work a desk job, usually."

  "That's doing wonders for my confidence in your ability to protect me. Anyway, you realize putting a safehouse in a rural small town is really dumb, right?"

  "What do you mean?" Noah asked as they stowed the groceries in the backseat of the car. "It's a long way from anywhere, and in the unlikely event that we do have to run, all we need to do is pick a highway. Nobody's going to look for us out here."

  "Long way from anywhere ... buddy, that's the problem." She hopped into the passenger's seat, and shook her head at the sight of a couple of old guys in trucker caps who'd stopped to admire the Camaro from the far side of the road. "I grew up in a small town, and take it from me, strangers stick out like a sore thumb and rural people are the biggest gossips you can possibly imagine. By tomorrow, everyone in town is going to know about the out-of-towner in the sweet red Camaro. Only a city person would think that hiding out in a small town is a good idea."

  "They still don't know where the house is," Noah said, somewhat stiffly.

  "Yeah, not until the neighbors notice a place that used to be empty has cars in the driveway now."

  "We've used this safehouse for years, Moreland. It's secure."

  Peri lifted a shoulder in a shrug. "Hey, I'm just telling you the facts."

  Noah shook his head and consulted a map on his phone. He turned back in the direction they'd come from, only to turn off almost immediately onto a winding road with heavily potholed pavement. Driving carefully to avoid scraping the underside of the Camaro, he navigated past scattered houses, fields, and dense, dark patches of woods. They were in the foothills of the Cascades now, and across hayfields or through serried ranks of orchard-planted apple trees, Peri glimpsed the pine-covered humps of the mountains rising above them. Roadside signs advertised farm stands selling apples, cherries, potatoes, squash.

  Noah turned off the road into the driveway of a ranch-style house, partly screened by trees. He started to park at the front, then continued to drive slowly on a rutted track that wrapped around the back of the house. He stopped the car behind a bright red Mini Cooper, the only other vehicle present.

  When the Camaro's rumbling engine died, a rural silence rushed in to fill the space. Peri drew a long, shaking breath. She enjoyed the speed and bustle of city life,
but oh, she hadn't even realized how much she'd missed this. The silence, the forest smells, the long pine shadows across the house's patchy lawn, even the moss growing in the cracks of the shingles ... Inhaling deeply, she breathed in the wet, mossy smell of the forest. There was a large propane tank behind the house, reminding her of a life lived without the support of city utilities.

  "You comin'?" Noah asked.

  "Of course I am." She shook herself out of her reverie and reached into the backseat to retrieve her backpack, while Noah got the groceries. She put her carbon-fiber running leg down on the floor so it was hidden from casual observers.

  "Don't you want your, uh, leg?"

  "If I have to run, I doubt I'll have time to take ten minutes to change legs. I figure it's safer in your car than carrying it around with me."

  "Fair point." Noah cranked up the top of the car and locked it.

  Rather than walking around to the front of the house, he led the way to the back door, which opened before they got there. A tiny woman in sock feet stepped out onto the small, rickety back porch. Her straight black hair was pulled back in a plain ponytail, and she wore an oversized cable-knit sweater and carried a gun in one hand, low at her side with the muzzle pointed down.

  "What'd you do, Easton, take the scenic route?"

  "It's all scenic out here," Noah said cheerfully. "Peri, this is Agent Cho. Cho, meet Peri Moreland. How are our guests settling in?"

  "They'll be doing better once we reassure them they aren't going to starve." She took a bag from him and reached out to give Peri a brisk, friendly smack in the arm. "Hi, you can call me Cho, or Jen if you prefer. Come on in. Unfortunately you're stuck with the one remaining bedroom, and it's basically a closet."

  "I don't mind," Peri said. "My old place was pretty tiny, too."

  She left Cho and Noah putting things away in the kitchen and wandered on into the living room, where she found the other two occupants of the house on the couch, watching TV. One was completely unfamiliar to her, a dark-haired woman about a decade older than Peri herself. The second, however ...